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I did not know there was a term for the so called miss labled or illegal chemicals keepers use.Sorry Barry if that offended you on such a heated disscussion.All honey buyers test honey by a ppm scale,Im sure cows,pigs,chickens etc,etc are tested as well.Everyone should remember bees can be so called poisioned from registered chems as well.

Posting reference

So then keepers that dont use any chemicals at all in their hives,does that make them organic or more special than someone else I think not.How many chems are brought back and stored in the hive naturally.

Yeah! 8 years ago the EPA had to raise the allowable tolerance of coumaphos from 10-15 parts per billion to 100 parts per billion cause 10-15 parts per billion honey was getting hard to come by. So now we're all comfortable with 100 ppb and think nothing of it. Your honey may be passing the acceptable levels of today, but it's potentially ten times more contaminated with coumaphos than it was eight years ago. Some want to manage in such a way as to have levels at or below those of eight years ago.

This thread has been a good demonstration of the diversity of the participants on this forum. We have input from wanna-bees to old-timers ; from hobbyists to full-time wholsalers. Purists, realists, philosophers, dreamers, kooks, scientists. What a mix! I love it. ANSWERS?? They're in there somewhere.

Walking in a land mine field

One only has to watch an observation hive to see how things get moved around in a hive. When the bees need brood room they move the honey up. When they need capping wax, they move wax where they need it. I see old dark wax moved up into the supers in my producing hives although I could not attest that I have seen honey moved up in them, who could?

My point is; just because you treat your hives with supers off does not mean that those chems don't get moved up into your supers when they are put on.

The only way to keep chems out of your supers is to not put the chems in your broods in the first place. There will still be a trace of contamination coming from the outside environment, but that is not controllable. The only control we have is what we put in our hives.

The last treatment I have used was Oxalic vapor and that was quite a few years ago now, but that is the only thing I have used since I have been here on Beesource. I don't buy foundation, I use Permacomb and remove all wax from cut-outs as soon as possible. I consider my honey as close to organic as is any honey that is labeled on the shelves to be.

When customers ask what 'Chemical free' on my label means I explain to them that I do not add any pesticides to my hives to control mites. That I may loose more hives because of this but I produce a better and cleaner product.

I find it ironic really, since I've now heard (here and elsewhere) of a couple of beekeepers that are dedicated to not treating for mites, and out breeding them, but have been using terramycin for years and years. I just learned of a local more well known beek who won't treat for mites, but always treats with tm.

Bacterial resistance is going to kill us all far quicker than a few ppm of coumaphos in our honey or super mites will.

scads writes:
I find it ironic really, since I've now heard (here and elsewhere) of a couple of beekeepers that are dedicated to not treating for mites, and out breeding them, but have been using terramycin for years and years.

tecumseh replies: just to make everything perfectly clear scads I do treat for mites and I do use tm.

any treatment for mites I might use has to be something that doesn't look like a pest strip and not contain some chlorinated hydrocarbon. history of past usage of this type of stuff suggest that any product along these lines will quite quickly produce a super bug. you can of course up the dosage (as some of Barry's references seems to suggest) but eventually the stronger dose will have little effect on the varroa but will quickly kill you. I saw this process (up close and personal) in operation on a large scale when I was a very young man and my attitude in regards to this will likely never change.

I have in the past used tm in the fall by dusting with powdered sugar. it was a portion of the fall rountine taught to me by an old commercial beekeepeer ....old habits are difficult to break. This year I will not treat and will play wait and see.

I have in the past used tm in the fall by dusting with powdered sugar. it was a portion of the fall rountine taught to me by an old commercial beekeepeer ....old habits are difficult to break. This year I will not treat and will play wait and see.

Yeah, I see that helping out new local beekeepers around here. They sprinkle the powder because they were told to sprinkle the powder. They have no idea why, but the bees need it.
I really hope that it goes well for you. I've never had a problem and hope to keep it that way too. I'll sprinkle the powder, but only at last resort and if I have a really good reason to....

In the meantime...I use chemicals. To clean (residues?), to brush my teeth, to clean my food, to wash my hair, to clean my body, to kill them dad-gummed wasps, to get the fingerprints off my windows, to preserve the wood in my house, to make my car move... If I have to use some on my bees to get them to survive, I'll use the mildest ones that will do the job and make sure it isn't in my honey enough to hurt anybody. As with anything else.

That is why honey is tested, to make sure the chems aren't getting into the honey. And if you are eating enough honey that you get sick from the little tiny amount that could exist in there...then maybe you need to revisit your diet.

I'm sure there are more accurate ways to describe contamination by undesirable compounds that are used as pesticides, or for other purposes, than to simply call them "chemicals".

Everything in our entire known universe is composed, entirely, of chemicals (and empty space). Honey is composed 100% of chemicals - seems hard to say that something that is made entirely of chemicals, is somehow "chemical free".